As most of you, I receive these pretty much daily. Whether it is from paypal, a specific bank, ebay, credit card company, etc. Most of the times its to an account that I've never used for that purpose. For example, today I received a Paypal one to an address that is not on file anywhere with Paypal. Its obviously been harvested from the net or from a mailing list.

One thing people ask is how they can tell if it is a scam. A very quick way is to take a look at the link they provide. If you use your cursor and hover over the link the real reference URL is displayed in the status bar (at the bottom of the browser or email window). Remember - what it says on the screen is not necessarily where the link goes. I've shown an example from today's email offering. You can't see my cursor but it is on-top of the link. Notice that the link talks about going to paypal's website, but the link actually goes to a numbered IP address. This numbered IP address is the scam site.